Sarah's Smart-Mouthed Grammar Blog: Part 2

Written By: Sarah Rushakoff

The mad dash siblings

I never used to mess with the em dash—the oldest, most responsible child—mostly because I didn’t understand what it was for. But y’all, em dashes are like the multi-tool of punctuation. Look at the em dash in all its glory—just waiting for you, the reader, to give it context. They can stand in for parentheses, commas, colons—use them all over if you want, just be consistent with how. Do you like the look of it without surrounding spaces, like I do? Or — and it pains me to break my own consistency here — do you like them with spaces? Do your thing, but what I want is for you to pick one and stick with it, at least throughout one project.

En dashes are a little shorter than em dashes. The same way an “m” is wider than an “n.” I find this cool and interesting. If you don’t, congratulations for reading this far, I guess, and why are you still here? En dashes are the middle child. Folks don’t know quite what to do with them, and sometimes folks don’t even know they exist. For my writing, I use en dashes 24⁠–7 to show ranges of numbers: dates, times, years, ages, whatever. That’s what I use them for. You can look up other uses if you’re interested.

The smallest, most misused child is the hyphen. You’ll see them all the time, posing shamelessly as their other siblings. They’ll almost do the job of em or en dashes, but not as effectively or elegantly. If an event was from 5-9pm, wouldn’t it be nicer if it was 5–9pm? But I’m not here to disparage the hyphen or blame it for being misused, it’s awesome when doing its own job.

I use hyphens most often for compound terms, which can appear as pretty much any part of speech. I can’t tell you right this second when to use compound terms as two separate words, joined with hyphens, or smushed together as one big word. It’s pretty much like what the Supreme Court said about art and pornography in 1964—I know it when I see it.

Break it down: I wear my glasses every day, they’re just normal, everyday glasses. I have strong arms so I can strong-arm people into using hyphens the way I want—which is however makes you happy with the result.